Not Victims: Another Case Against the Clubs

I want to comment on Sam's final club post, because I find it compelling but nevertheless insufficient. Here's why.

Sam gives us the standard-line "progressive critique” of the clubs – which has been made many times before, by the likes of April Yee here, Sabrina Lee here, and most recently by Daniel Herz-Roiphe, a club member, here – and more or less says the following: final clubs are bad because they perpetuate racism, elitism, and sexism (in some form or another) and because they glorify a crude caricature of masculinity, a throwback traditionalism, a groupthink, and so on. Sabrina Lee writes that, "Final clubs, as inherently exclusive institutions, foster a homosocial environment that creates a whole host of social problems, including intensified notions of male superiority, heightened sexual aggression, heteronormativity, and the inability to ethically evaluate one’s own actions."

To me, this critique goes too far – and then again, not far enough.

First, I suspect that the argument, on its merits, is weaker than some believe. All evidence points to the fact that the clubs are more racially and economically diverse than ever before. They might not be “diverse” in a substantive sense (I’ll get to that in a second) but it's true that the progressive critique is getting progressively weaker. I haven’t done any fieldwork, but I do have final club friends. The final clubbers that I know are not elitist, or racist, or homophobic. Not even close.

Do final clubs propagate certain race and class norms? Yes. That's important. But it’s hardly damning. Final clubs can, literally, do what they want (within the bounds of the law). And institutionally, they're perfectly right in selecting for and preserving their own self-image – which institutions, after all, do not? The Crimson? The Hasty Pudding Theatricals? The Advocate? The IOP? Any sociology of the Harvard extracurricular scene would reveal that there is a multiplicity of sub-cultures here, each erecting hierarchies predicated on subtle judgment, explicit exclusion, implicit control, etc. Do final clubs restrict women? Yes. But so do frats.

My point isn't that final club culture is good -- far from it, in my opinion. Of course final clubs should let in women. Of course they should be more open, more tolerant of diversity, less “homosocial,” less repressive – I’ll get to all that. My point, instead, is that the progressive critique goes about arguing for the right thing in the wrong way. By postulating the existence of final club “victims” -- of people on the receiving ends of final clubs’ deprivation – the progressive critique makes the case against the clubs litigious. My impulse is to say: Harvard students aren't victims! Don't pretend that they are. That’s a low view of your peers -- of the final club males, who aren’t criminals, of the folks that show up to the parties (who really do go voluntarily...and look so pretty and have such a nice time) and of the vast majority of people that don’t care about the clubs one way or another. As a court case, the progressive critique is a laughing stock.

The progressive critique is too easy to dismiss; it overplays its hand; it’s impossibly adversarial. No one is going to admit that they’re a sexist pig or a racist pig or a pig pig. And most Harvard students have no reason to. If that's our only argument, then we're always going to be shouting from the outside.

Second, more importantly: My problem with the progressive critique is that it lets the final clubs off the hook. I know this from experience. When my final club friends hear the argument that the clubs are racist/elitist/sexist, they invariably tune out. They agree on substance that being a chauvinist pig is bad, but they look at their own record (non-white, not rich, loving long-term partner, liberal, whatever) and they assume they're in the clear. But they're not. Supporting final clubs is still wrong, and we need a vocabulary to express that, even to the hard cases (especially to the hard cases, for they -- not the rapists proper -- are the ones we might hope to convince).

I begin with the premise that while racism/elitism/sexism are necessary standards for anyone to be held against, they're definitely not sufficient standards. “Not raping girls" is not the sine qua non of your responsibilities to this community; being a Harvard student means so much more. My case is that final clubs are bad because they don't do good – because they exist in this community and yet never give back to it; because they have resources and yet work only for themselves; because they don’t try to make this school (or this world) a better place.

In other words, final clubs don't break the rules of our community; they violate its spirit. To quote from the student handbook: "By accepting membership in the University, an individual joins a community ideally characterized by free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change." Final clubs disgrace the premise of Harvard community. They reject the our togetherness: their resources are spent helping themselves or aggressively excluding others. And they reject some of our most basic values as an educational institution – values like openness, merit, diversity and public-spiritedness.

It’s not the students who are backwards, it's the institutions. They exist like old, malignant growths lodged between a University that’s democratizing and a world that’s more meritocratic and diverse than ever before. So I speak not as an activist but as a consultant. I’d say to the clubs, if given the chance: in the 20^th century, power might have come from exclusion and traditionalism pastiche and etiquette. But the world is changing. You need another strategy. In today's world, power comes from inclusion, from networks, from creativity and heterodoxy and awesomeness. So long as the clubs reject these principles, they represent retarding forces on the progress of our moral and intellectual sensibilities as a community. They slow us down.

My case against final clubs, then, is not that they’re bad because they hurt some of us. They're bad because they're not good. In situating themselves in opposition to our community they hurt themselves and, in that way, they hurt all of us.

Photo Credit: Flickr stream of eileansiar

Rape Is Not Ambiguous

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

NPR News has an excellent article up this week on the persistence of rape and sexual violence on college campuses. In honor of Women's Week and "Feminist Coming Out Day" here at Harvard, I thought I'd make a few comments:

There's a common assumption about men who commit sexual assault on a college campus: That they made a one-time, bad decision. But psychologist David Lisak says this assumption is wrong —-and dangerously so...

He found them by, over a 20-year period, asking some 2,000 men in college questions like this: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?"

Or: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn't want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn't cooperate?"

About 1 in 16 men answered "yes" to these or similar questions....

It might seem like it would be hard for a researcher to get these men to admit to something that fits the definition of rape. But Lisak says it's not. "They are very forthcoming," he says. "In fact, they are eager to talk about their experiences. They're quite narcissistic as a group — the offenders — and they view this as an opportunity, essentially, to brag."

What Lisak found was that students who commit rape on a college campus are pretty much like those rapists in prison. In both groups, many are serial rapists. On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes.

And these offenders on campuses — just like men in prison for rape — look for the most vulnerable women. Lisak says that on a college campus, the women most likely to be sexually assaulted are freshmen.

Some people seem to believe that campus rape is an "unclear" or "difficult" issue. They say that alcohol sufficiently complicates our judgments, and that, for this reason, the term "rape" is often not appropriate. This article utterly destroys that case.

Stated most strongly, the "rape is a tough issue" argument says that anti-rape campaigns do not emphasize enough the sovereign choice of the female. Women need to be clear about their sexual choices. Sex -- like all matters of the human heart -- is naturally mixed-up and full of indecision, and part of what it means to believe in the equality of the sexes is to believe that both women and men are strong enough to make their desires decisively clear. They argue that "yes, maybe, I don't know" cases, infused with alcohol, are not rape. They say we shouldn't be labeling rapists retrospectively.

But the fact is, we're not! As this article explains, the vast majority of rape cases are, in fact, pellucidly clear. They involve repeat offenders who know the sexual choices of their victims, and they in turn know that they're violating those choices. The face of campus rape is not the drunk girl and guy who do something that they kinda sorta regret. The face of campus rape is the man who subdues and violates his victim.

To my mind, the arguments about the "confounding" effects of alcohol are more than just canards -- they're close cousins to the blame-the-victim arguments that have been trotted out to exonerate rapists all around world and all throughout history. For the vast majority of cases-- alcohol or no alcohol, peers or strangers -- rape is not ambiguous.

Whiteness as a Social Phenomenon

Whiteness is ownership of the earth. -- W.E.B. Du Bois

Some wholesome, good-old American radicalism. Update: Ally Work blog asked if this article could be included in the blog carnival called "Erase Racism." It looks like she has some nice stuff there, so do check it out if you're interested.

Black advocate Mark Haley tells a story about Malcolm X. Both men are in an airport together. A plane lands and a group of bright-eyed Eastern European children take their first steps on American soil. Malcolm turns to Haley and says, "Pretty little children. Soon they're going to learn their first English word: nigger."

Broadly, Malcolm might be right. The viral permanency of “race” as a social concept is a uniquely American phenomenon. America is the one nation in the world that imported a group of people half-way around the world, bred them and then enslaved them. Resultantly, no facet of modern American society can escape the ever-presence of race, no social progress or economic betterment or political victory is achieved independent of race, and no action, personal or institutional can be made outside the framework of race, who is advantaged and why. Of course, the word “race” refers to much more than biology. It must be seen as much more than skin colors. “Whiteness,” specifically, is a social construction, aptly conceptualized as cultural property. It is a possession that provides tremendous material and symbolic privilege. It is a constellation of norms, ideologies, economic factors and social predisposions that gives rise to a hierarchical system of existence, created at the birth of this nation for the expressed purpose of power and subjugation. The 2005 academy award-winning movie Crash provocatively and unflinchingly examines this concept of whiteness, in essence, the concept of ownership over society.

American progressives work to inculcate children with the truth that racism exists in society. They weave the familiar narrative that oppression puts people down, and that American culture has nurtured – even today – this oppressive dynamic. The story, however, is not complete. Importantly, the accepted concept of racism neglects the reciprocal relationship between oppression and profit. Whiteness is not just about the elevation of the value of one culture, but depends fundamentally on the devaluation of other culture. Thus, the existence of “Black disadvantage” necessitates the existence of “white advantage.” This unacknowledged privilege, enjoyed by every single white person in society, is the essence of “whiteness” as a social construction.

Read the entire essay here.

Historical and Contemporary Nativism

America has been asked, from forces within, to supply answers to questions of cultural values. We're at a political juncture that demands, once again, that we define who we are as a people: whether our orchestras of fear will drown out our cries for tolerance, and whether our impulses toward ethnocentrism will bully our collective pysche into submission. This call for affirmation is not new. Nativism has played an important role in shaping American history, and, once again, promises to take center stage in the theater of cultural agitation. My paper on the wave of nativism from 1900 to 1930 is apropos, if you will:

American society esteems itself as a sanctuary for the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses of the world. It adamantly claims to celebrate the principles of rowdy ethnic pluralism and colorful cultural diversity at the core of its identity. However, the proverbial melting pot of American society has not, and perhaps never will, epitomize the egalitarian spirit of the American Dream ‚– the belief that this nation is an unlimited beacon of hope and opportunity. From the 1798 Alien Acts, which required the immediate expulsion of foreigners ‚“dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,‚” to modern-day Islamophobia, American patriotism and fear during times of change have drummed up anti-foreign stirrings to a shrill pitch. Nativism, in simple terms, is a dogged adherence to the belief that race functions as the most important determinant of cultural identity; this played an important role in the shaping of America at the dawn of the twentieth century. The self-righteous clamoring of reformers during the progressive era coupled with the drastic changes of post-World War I America incited a new sense of nativism during the 1920s and 1930s that aimed to preserve a rose-colored conception of true Americanism.

Read the rest of the essay.

We've Got a Helpin' Hand to Lend

If the Democrats in Washington knew what’s good for them, they’d come out in vocal and unequivocal support of immigration. In the days of my youth (hmm), I wrote on the importance of immigration in American society. I would now like to comment on the importance of immigration for the Democratic Party.

On a principled level, the goals of the immigration movement are at the very heart of the progressive agenda. A popular argument against immigration claims that jobs are taken away from lower-class workers. However, the plight of the working-class American is the plight of the exploited-class immigrant, so the American and immigrant labor movements -- superficially adversarial -- are in fact united under the sweat and blood of the down-trodden worker everywhere. Immigrant and American workers are brothers within the larger battle against economic injustice. The fight for higher wages, labor law enforcement, greater health-care coverage, and tighter checks against worker exploitation does not discriminate against race or nationality; it is a fight that promises higher living standards for all workers everywhere.

A progressive embrace of immigration is not just humane policy, moreover, but wise politics. Numerically, the Hispanic population could become a powerful voting block for the Democratic Party; Ideologically, they're not far off. Standing at literal geographical crossroads, immigrants tend to oppose globalization and colonialism. They see the government as an agent of human welfare, as a force against the economic injustice that they embody. Racially profiled and socially discriminated against, they know first-hand the importance of civil liberties and personal freedom. And the list goes on. Importantly, immigrants remind America that border patrollers and barbed-wire fences cannot snuff-out the brutally real problems of global injustice. We should ask not, how are immigrants crossing into our country, but why. We should investigate the practices that perpetuate the destitution which forces these people into our nation -- not just deport them.

Yes, Hispanics are a fixture of social conservatism, but political alliances are fostered not spontaneously self-assembled. We should acknowledge the Immigration Movement as born from the struggles of progressivism, and love it as our own.

Update: El Norte, all your questions will be answered. Salta la sangre '06.

What has the Democratic Party ever done for blacks in America?

Walter Mosley's article in this week's Nation raises an interesting point about party politics in the United States. Basically, he argues that if third-party interests coalesced into structured political voting blocks, the Republican and Democratic conglomerates would be more sensitive to the muted needs of the nation's disadvantaged.

However, I wonder, if we were to disolved our two-party infrastructure and replaced it with some type of parliamentary pluralism, would we damage the framework for coherent opposition? The last two paragraphs of the article are quite powerful:

America has carried the notion of property and power to such an intensely negative degree that we have very little room left for humanity and art in our hearts. We work long hours, eat bad food, close our eyes to the atrocities committed in our name and spend almost everything we make on the drugs that keep us from succumbing to the emptiness of our spiritual lives. We gobble down antidepressants, sleeping pills, martinis, sitcoms and pornography in a desperate attempt to keep balance in this soulless limbo.

In a world where poetry is a contest at best and a competition at worst, where the importance of a painting is gauged by the price it can be sold for--we are to be counted among the lost. And so when I say that we need leaders and that those leaders must come from our youth, it is no idle statement. We need our young people because without their dreams to guide us we will have only cable TV and grain alcohol for succor.

Marriage and Female Vulnerability

My feminism paper: American society prides itself on its social freedoms and egalitarian values. Democracy has had a rich legacy in American history, and indeed great strides have been made within our nation to construct a more equitable social code, one that deviates less and less from the promise of “liberty and justice for all,” recited daily in our Pledge of Allegiance. However, despite advances, tremendous sex-based inequalities still exist. A woman employed fulltime earns a startling 75 cents to the likewise fulltime employed man's dollar, more than one half of poor families are headed by a single mother, and more than twice as many elderly women are impoverished when compared to the number of men in the same age bracket.[1]

Vast inequalities between male and female social status are no longer borne out of legal mandates, but out of underlying conceptions about gender-based obligations. Though legal provisions have attempted to establish female equality within the workforce, few provisions have done the same for the protection of justice within the domestic sphere, and the advancement of women has continued to be tyrannized by antiquated social dictations and constraints. The expectation and actuality of the division of labor between household management and money earning within the home creates a dynamic of power that devalues female contributions and emasculates their social, economic and political influence. Moreover, despite rapidly expanding female employment, archaic gender expectations still define marriage and childrearing, forcing even working women to make unfortunate decisions between their careers and their families. Fundamentally, it’s the unequal distribution of paid and unpaid resources within the institution of marriage that leaves women economically and socially vulnerable; domestic inequality that transcends into every facet of American society. Wedding rings, in many respects, dignify the suspension of social justice.

The institution of marriage is a social relic; a vestige of a time when gender roles were cemented firmly in place and women wielded no political or economic power. Socially constructed concepts of “gender obligation” helped lay the framework for “matrimonial obligation,” and sex-based stereotypes became constituent to marriage’s existence. Certain sexes, it was once believed, were naturally relegated to certain spheres within society; men, of course, asserted themselves as being intellectually and physically dominant, and roles in society were sorted with such conceptions in mind.

Though many of the arguments made throughout the centuries about the biological inferiority of women have fallen out of favor, the patriarchal power structures that naturally extended from these beliefs, to a large extent still exist and thrive within today’s society: despite increasing female participation in the workforce, it is still widely assumed that a certain division of labor should position women as the primary caretakers and men as the primary money earners. Marriage throughout the ages has served as a bulwark of the status quo, amidst great tides of liberalization. Though women have drastically increased their potential to affect change in modern society, a result largely achieved due to the efforts made during the upsurge of feminism within the 1970s, the institution of marriage continues to propagate a repressive power structure that prevents women from getting ahead.

Wanna know how? Read the rest of the paper here.

---

[1] Kelly Rathje, “Male Versus Female Earnings – Is the Gender Wage Gap Converging?,” Economica, Sept. 2002 < http://www.economica.ca/ew71p2.htm>.

Hate Crimes in America

Through a certain lens, it seems that the contemporary political climate within the United States is a particularly divisive one. Our society may be defined by our remarkably polarized political desires, by our national attention on our soldiers' death abroad, and by the sociopolitical and economic gaps which result in ideological clashes over the extension of gay and lesbian rights, the morality of judgeship, and immigration laws. According to the Christian Science Monitor, this political climate is a breading ground for intolerance and hate. In fact, according to this article, the number of active hate groups in the U.S. has increased from 474 in 1997 to 762 in 2004, while intolerance and civil rights violations against Muslim Americans has increased 48 percent from last year.

Recent incidents include cross burnings in North Carolina, threats against gay students on an Oregon campus, disruptions of anti-immigration meetings by those charging border vigilantes with racism, anti-Semitic graffiti in the Queens borough of New York, a whites-only group recruiting in Michigan, whiteseparatess harassing Japanese residents in Las Vegas, and a rise in anti-Muslim activity.

It seems that the United States' world image is that of intolerance, both emanated and received. If we desire to quell these surges in hate crimes, it's necessary not only to strive for more austere regulations, such as those proposed last week by Ted Kennedy, but also to shift the mentality of the people.